The IT departments of Fortune 1000 customers have a long line of vendors knocking down their door everyday to sell their cloud wares. Cloud security, cloud storage, cloud compute are all hot growth areas while traditional IT budgets continue to shrink.

In many of my meetings with IT leaders, discussions quickly devolve into a comparison of vendors. But when I ask the fundamental question of “does your company have a cloud strategy governance document” most often it is crickets.

When the answer from vendors is always cloud, people have forgotten to ask the simple question of why?. A written, executive-approved cloud strategy sets the corporate framework surrounding how vendor and technology decisions should be made around cloud that best meets their business outcome objectives.

A Cloud Strategy Governance Document needs to consider many elements starting with the mission statement of the enterprise which flows into desired business outcomes, and then the high level goals of how IT supports these missions. A strong cloud strategy document ensures that business IT investment decisions are made in a consistent framework that maximizes return on investment and topline growth and profitability of the enterprise

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